In the old days you might have had a few favorite newspapers you’d regularly browse through. A few years ago, you probably started browsing through your favorite online news sources. Today, there are a lot more options and cross-interests leading people to sometimes browse upwards of 12 – 25 sites daily. This doesn’t include following Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn updates. It’s complete madness and it’s a time black hole.

Fortunately for readers, duo Jordan Steeves and Matt Durak launched FeedStream. Still in beta but deliciously efficient, FeedStream offers web newsreaders a more refined solution. Users receive a visual stream of incoming news, simple and well-designed pages to read, plus a host of sharing tools. You’ll also find it easy to manage your top news sources.

Visualize this: Your homepage gives you an incredibly clean to the point of futuristic design that clearly identifies top stories across your favorite content sites – all of which are first sectioned by category and then publication. You scroll horizontally through one source, then the next and so on.

FeedStream is smart. It recognized the trend and usefulness of image marketing along with the reality that content marketing is still a top priority. Pairing the two, it still offers content but features it like rows of Polaroids that let you quickly scan content and grasp what you need. Kindle’s Pulse needs to take some tips here. Pulse, while useful, pales in comparison to this budding idea.

Still in beta, FeedStream doesn’t offer all the content you’d want – but it offers enough to make it worth your while. As it gains popularity and moves out of beta, it’ll confidently tout a much longer selection of categories and publications to choose from. In the meantime, functionality, design and a simple-to-use dashboard makes FeedStream a must-have tool for daily use. Or perhaps you still want to browse upwards of who knows how many sites per day, not to mention straining your eyes against individual design pages, advertisements and plugs to get to the content you want.

What This Means for Content Publishers

Content publishers once again have to up their game. If you simply look at the host of stories available, you’ll find that…

  • There are a lot of stories, which means you better start producing more content if you’re looking to get on top or stay there.
  • Your content needs be far more original, inspiring or creative. It’s not enough to offer generic data like an “x” number of ways even a monkey could do PR. Rather you’ve got to offer a story with the foresight and analysis of a psychic, packaged in the rhetoric of a master story teller. Talk to people; don’t direct them with empty initiatives or waste their time with misleading titles that leave them equally less informed as when they began reading a piece.

What This Means for Developers

FeedStream is brilliant and it should be a call to action for other developers who need to do more to integrate platforms that merge user needs. FeedStream is a leader in the field and with how well it’s designed, I imagine it’ll be a leader for some time to come.

Content management and marketing is where it’s at right now. Expect to see more developments in this field. If you’re a developer and want to get on the bandwagon, the best place to start is with content writers, marketers and managers. Ask them what their job description is and where their frustrations lie – and you’ve got yourself a pool of data for the next great idea.